


Our Hearts Are Small

by waltzmatildah



Category: The Vampire Diaries
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 05:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11052018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: 1864. Prompt,our hearts are small and ever thinning...





	Our Hearts Are Small

He hears voices rising softly, nothing more than the faint promise of life. Venturing idly between carefully manicured hedgerows, he comes across them both in the formal garden at the front of the homestead; allows the late afternoon shadows to envelop him for a beat as he takes pause to... notice.

Miss Katherine's chin angles ever so coyly in his brother's direction, a coquettish pose he can be convinced is not intentional. He concedes soft laughter at the notion, after all, it is equally unlikely poor, innocent Stefan has recognised the gesture for all that it could be either.

 

 

 

 

 

The white-washed sky overhead paints a most brilliant backdrop: sedate in a way that serves only to emphasise their ornate perfection. Mahogany curls that loop delicately to the deep bow of her corset. The slant of a muscular set of shoulders he doesn't recall noticing previously.

Stefan laughs suddenly. Light and joyous. A reverent sound that echoes sharply through his hollowed out insides. Miss Katherine raises a gloved hand to Stefan's forearm in response. And for a moment they are one. A silhouette joined along a common ridge.

He revels in a voyeuristic thrill; unexpected and shocking. Like he has bared witness to something rare.

He thinks, suddenly, he falls in love with them then.

 

 

 

 

 

She makes herself known to him some weeks later. Smiles a mouth full of fangs in his direction and doesn't bother to ask him first. Seems to understand as well as he does in that moment that any gesture of requesting permission would be symbolic at best.

He murmurs her name thickly around the cloying weakness; side-effects of the blood-letting, both. He is equal parts terrified and enraptured.

Closes his eyes and thinks, inexplicably, of Stefan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the days that follow he watches them circle each other through lids lifted to a perpetual half-mast. Surreptitious in his longing. When her bed is cold and empty in the small hours of the early morning, he moves along darkened hallways to his brother's room. Rests his palm against the cool wood of the closed door and inhales the tell-tale sounds of mutual pleasure.

Can't quite fathom whether the shifting of his insides is borne of jealousy or desire.

Figures a little of both to be the truth.

 

 

 

 

 

That her demise coincides with theirs should be poetry. And perhaps it is.

For after all, rage and hysteria and deep, dark despair have the power to create the most haunting of lullabies.

 

 

 

 

 

In the end, he leaves Stefan. Though they both will come to recognise that Stefan leaves him first in all the ways that will forever count the most.

In the bone-numbing absence of anything else, his quest to rescue her becomes a single-minded mantra. A blood-slicked swath carved through city after city after never-ending city.

At night he dreams. A white-washed sky, azure and pearl, loose cotton curls and the slant of shoulders that he thinks could support his entire world. He wakes violently to thunder, though the dusty street corners remain resolutely dry.

Mocking.

 

 

 

 

 

It is a century later and she laughs up at him freely. A condescending kind of pleasure at his expense. He wants to plunge his fists into her chest and tear her heart from where it pounds lazily beneath her ribs.

He wants to plunge his fists into her chest and then follow them whole. To take up a permanent kind of residence in the only place that ever felt like home to him.

He hates her then. And his brother, too.

He hates himself the most.

 

 

 

 

 

The memory of her, the fantasy he maintained for lifetimes, is complicated only by what it is that she became. He thinks, absently, the same could be said of Stefan.

...that the same could be said of him, too.


End file.
